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Red Ascending

Sean Scully’s Red Ascending, from 1990, is a twelve foot wide, eight-foot tall oil painting on linen with the look of decorative tilework or a parquet-wood floor. About a dozen neat and closely arranged light- and dark-striped rectangles, or tiles, fill nearly the entire area. Light-colored bluish-gray stripes alternate with simple black–parallel and equal in width. From tile to tile, vertical stripes alternate with horizontal ones–with two to seven stripes per tile.

The tiles differ in size depending on how many, but also on how long and whether they run lengthwise or across their narrow aspect. Some of the tiles stand upright, and others lie flat.

Cutting through the bluish-gray and black tilework to the right of center is a stacked column of six, reddish-brown squares, all about equal in size to the smallest of the light-and-dark tiles. The column divides the as-if tiled area into two sections: A large, roughly square section on the left, and a narrow section, about a-third-as-wide, on the right.

Within the reddish brown squares, subtly discoloring horizontal striations resemble the grain of wood. Recognizable as the bristle tracks of a wide paint brush, however, they about equally evoke tiles painted to resemble wood. A glinty speckling of the surface of the painting corroborates the look of ceramic tiles somewhat. But the realistic resemblances don’t really cohere, except as an engaging design.